• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I wrote an unsatisfactory piece recently in which I attempted to elaborate on the paradoxical kinship that seems (to me) to exist between extremist Christianity and extremist atheism. (q.v. https://cohost.org/pnictogen-wing/post/1644033-the-kinship-between)

These things have come to be more alike than different, in Western discourse, and I think the case can be made that obnoxious "New Atheism" and right-wing Christianity in fact prop each other up to some extent. But they do differ as well, and I'd like to try to explain that difference in a general way, without reference to specific ideological concepts. And that's tough, especially with Christianity, which maintains its grip on Western society partly by controlling language about "religion" and insuring that certain Christian concepts are always kept near the forefront of discourse. Christians want very much to pretend that the concepts of their religion are settled facts about the Cosmos, as obvious and irrefutable as electrical charge or gravitational attraction.

So how do you talk about Christianity without using Christian concepts? I think perhaps the best approach is through the general concept of mystery. "Mystery" is a word with many meanings but here I mean something philosophical, even spiritual: a mystery is a fundamental truth about the Cosmos that isn't just unknown, but unknowable. If you accept the existence of mystery in this philosophical sense, then you accept that there are certain things about the universe that no amount of inquiry or experimentation or analysis will ever uncover. The Heisenberg principle might be considered as a scientific formalization of mystery, for example: the more accurately we can predict a particle's position in space the less we know of its momentum, and vice versa.

Not all human minds are comfortable with fundamental unknowability, and I would hazard to guess that the Western mind in particular has not been good with mystery. Indeed "mystery", in common parlance, means something that can be solved. Our entertainment and popular culture are saturated with ostensibly complete and final explanations for mysteries—purported solutions to old crimes, declarations about the true meaning of movies and video games, elaborate "theories" about incongruous events from news and history. Western culture places such an enormous social value on presenting oneself as having a godlike command of all facts and knowledge that hardly anybody these days is satisfied with anything being shadowed by doubt and uncertainty. the "rationalists" and New Atheists claim that Science™ has solved, and will continue to solve, all conceivable problems; the Christians have faithfully imitated the "rationalist" pose.

And that's led to a perplexing phenomenon, in right-wing Christian culture, when it comes to mystery, because unlike the "rationalists" and atheists, Christians still take pride in having an understanding of spiritual mystery. Search around online a tiny bit and you'll find loads of pompous Christian editorials about sacred mysteries and the importance of the unknowable (here's a right-wing Catholic example: https://archive.is/i8d7t) and probably you'll stumble across the claim that Christianity has inherited the spirit of the Greek mystery religions—for Christianity has sought, from time to time, to position itself as the true continuation of pagan spirituality, its fulfillment and culmination you could say.

But this is a problem: Christianity tries to have it both ways. They claim that they're the custodians of sacred mystery, but they also claim that they have all the answers—i.e. their "mystery" is no mystery at all. Indeed it's difficult to imagine a human being with less sense of sacred mystery than the typical right-wing Christian fanatic; such persons are apt to claim to have definite and "objective" answers for everything, and even to claim that their "objective" answers are scientifically proved. The "rationalist" people, at least, are consistent in their believe that mystery simply doesn't exist at all—everything has a definite reason and explanation, to a rationalist. the Christian would like to behave that way but they also want to keep some sort of grip on mystery, because mystery is useful to them; it's concealment for crimes.

Why do so many Good Christians™ abuse and molest their children?

It's a mystery. It's God's ineffable love...somehow.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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